Context-Centered Data Services: The Next IT Decision Support Challenge

Overview: IT decision support impacts all aspects of technology management, from governance and strategy to budgets and
resource plans. The effectiveness of IT decision support all too frequently falls prey to data-driven challenges - like
overwhelming volumes, heterogenous data types, and complexity - that make it difficult to understand the data in
context. Just as the cobbler's children in the old fable had no shoes, IT leaders are falling foul of the very same decision
support challenges that IT works hard to avoid across their firms' other organizations. And the really bad news: This
challenge is expected to get worse - and to spread beyond the IT organization.
In the summer of 2013, BDNA commissioned Forrester Consulting to assess how data impacts the effectiveness of IT
decision support. To that end, Forrester developed a survey to test the hypothesis that data challenges limit the
effectiveness of IT decision support - and that dealing with these challenges will lead to large companies depending on
third-party help.
To test this thinking, Forrester conducted surveys with 115 US senior-level IT decision-makers (IT and corporate
management leaders) - adding in-depth follow-up interviews with some of them. Forrester found this hypothesis to be
true: Data-driven challenges limit the effectiveness of IT decision support - and many users expect to turn to thirdparty
vendors for help.